One of the earliest assaults on segregated transit in the South occurred in Louisville, Ky., in 1870-71. There, the city’s black community organized a successful protest that relied on nonviolent direct action, a tactic that would give shape to the modern civil rights movement nearly a century later.

In Boston, widely regarded as the center of the abolitionist movement, black leaders called on citizens to resist the newly passed Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 in order “to make Massachusetts a battlefield in defense of liberty.”

“The Irish and the English share a long legacy of conflict.” And this conflict extended across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World as a wave of Catholic immigrants arrived in the United States in the 1820s.

Two friends who attend different schools in the same community learn that one of their schools has no instruments for their music program, while the other has multiple different kinds. They use their friendship and musical abilities to confront this inequity and try to bring about change.

In this chapter, Carnes details oppression experienced by the early New England colonists. In particular, he chronicles Mary Dyer’s path from a once uncomfortably conforming Puritan to an outspoken Quaker unshaken by threats, banishment and even death.

Michael Dunn, a white male, shot and killed Jordan Davis, an unarmed African-American male, while Davis was in a parked vehicle at a gas station. This segment from 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets profiles various perspectives regarding the role that race played in the killing.

In this interview, Marian Wright Edelman expresses the importance of each American sending children “signals of fairness and tolerance” and helping to give them “a life that transcends boundaries of race, class, gender and other differences.”

In his 1941 State of the Union Address, President Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined four fundamental human freedoms—the freedom of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear—for the United States and the rest of the world.

Elizabeth MacQueen is the sculptor of Four Spirits, a monument built to memorialize the four girls killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. In her memoir, she discusses how the project revealed to her how sheltered she had been as a child growing up in Birmingham.